Over on Facebook in a Marvel Comics alumni group, Ted Jalbert has posted a July 1976 Get Well card to Stan Lee which I’d completely forgotten I’d ever signed, dug out of the archives The Man had donated to the University of Wyoming.

It shows Stan on crutches wearing a cast, so I’m guessing he’d broken a leg—though perhaps that was only metaphorical—and was drawn by Paty Cockrum. Included are caricatures of Stan, John Verpoorten, Archie Goodwin, and many other Marvel staffers, plus the signatures of John Romita (both Sr. and Jr.), Walt Simonson, my wife Irene Vartanoff, Steve Edelson …

Steve Edelson? Wait—who’s Steve Edelson?

I’m Steve Edelson!

The reason I signed the card that way was because even though I was the one who organized the panels for the 1975 Mighty Marvel Conand edited the program book (so you’d think Stan would get my name right), when it came time there for him to introduce all us Marvel staffers from the stage, he pointed me out and called me … you guessed it … Steve Edelson.

So, of course, I’d tease him about that whenever I’d get the chance. When this card was put in front of me the following year, I apparently couldn’t resist.

The first—and last—comic book to which I ever subscribed was Fantastic Four.

It was my first because after all, it was the “The World’s Greatest Comic Magazine”—wasn’t that what Stan Lee had been telling us on the cover almost from the beginning? And for several amazing years in the ’60s, that seemingly hyberbolic claim may not have been all that hyperbolic after all.

And it was my last because—have you ever seen a subscription copy of a comic book from the ’60s? If not, you might not realize how poorly they were treated. They were folded in half lengthwise and then wrapped in brown paper on which an address label was slapped. By the time copy arrived in the mail, that fold was an eternal crease, a condition from which any true comic book collector would recoil.

But if you’ve subscribed to a comic book during the past few decades, then you know that this destructive practice was eventually eliminated. Would you like to know when? (more…)

So I was on the way home from Fort Lauderdale, where I’d spent a couple of weeks helping my mother pack and move (the details of which are a tale for another time), when I spotted a guy at the airport walking quickly by while wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the face of a mustachioed man chomping a cigar.

I pointed at his chest as he passed and asked, “Stan Lee?”

“No,” he said, followed by him revealing who it really was, which I heard as “Ditko.”

Letters columns, when they exist at all in comics these days, are no longer what they once were—their importance has been supplanted by the Internet. They used to be where readers discovered they were not alone, and learned that their tribe was out there. It’s where we debated what we loved, found friends, formed fan clubs, and sometimes (as with Dave Cockrum and Andrea Kline) even met spouses.

But there was a time when Stan Lee, as the Marvel Universe was exploding, almost put the kibosh on all letter columns but one.

I imagine it must have been tough to keep up when all those superhero titles were launching, each requiring its own letters column. His solution—drop them, add the freed pages to the stories themselves, and answer all Marvel mail in the Fantastic Four.

In Spider-Man #7 (cover-dated December 1963), he asked readers if they thought this was a good idea.

Spider-Man #8 (January 1964) was way too early for Marvel to have received any letters, so Stan just asked for more feedback. (more…)

There’s a ton of fun stuff you’ll want to hear, such as the boos that erupted when Stan mentioned Steve Ditko’s departure from Marvel and the cheers that arose when he brought up the Silver Surfer.

Plus there’s plenty of ammo for Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby partisans, such as when Stan called Ditko a “peculiar guy” who’s “a little eccentric,” and said that he hadn’t “spoken to this guy for over a year,” or when he talked about how surprised he was when the Silver Surfer turned up in the Fantastic Four, an event which had caused Stan to ask, “Who’s this naked nut running around?”

But what most piqued my interest, and caused me to consider a question I should have asked long ago but for some reason never thought to, was Stan’s explanation of the Marvel method, which begins at the 17:35 mark.

(And don’t worry—the audio quality picks up after the first few minutes.) (more…)

Way back in the ’70s, Marvel’s Sol Brodsky commissioned me to write an Incredible Hulk coloring book. I wrote the script, turned it in, got paid for it … and then never heard a thing about it ever again.

Not until last week, when I spotted a cover from 1977 over at The Marvel Age of Comics Tumblr which had me wondering … is that the same coloring book I wrote? I couldn’t be sure, but luckily, within a few hours, Paul Di Filippo alerted me to an eBay auction, and I jumped, exercising the Buy Now option so there’d be no chance I’d lose out.

Well, now that I’ve had a chance to read the thing—all 230 words of it—I’m going to say that this is the coloring book I wrote all those years ago. And I’ll keep saying that until someone comes along to contradict me. (more…)

I’ll be heading off to Comic-Con tomorrow, which I’ll be covering on behalf of Blastr, as I’ve been doing since 2007. (Covering Comic-Con, that is, not covering it on behalf of Blastr, since at times I was doing it for the previous incarnations of either SCI FI Wire or Science Fiction Weekly.)

Each of those years gave me the gift of an encounter that stood out above all others, a special moment that had to do with the kid inside of me, and not with the me who was there reporting to the world what was going on in San Diego. (Not that those two me’s can always be separated.)

Here’s a photo a year, capturing those moments.

2007

Catching up with former boss Stan Lee, who dubbed me “Sparkling” Scott Edelman back in the ’70s when I worked for him in the Bullpen—because everyone who works at Marvel needs a nickname, right?

We all remember why Peter Parker decided that with great power came great responsibility, right? It’s because way back during his first appearance in Amazing Fantasy #15, Spider-Man decided that “from now on I just look out for Number One,” and let a common criminal get away …

A few weeks ago, I was bemoaning the fact that the world seemed to have forgotten EC Comics artist Bernard Krigstein, a thought brought about by two (then ongoing) Heritage original art auctions of complete comics adaptations of Ray Bradbury short stories.

“Mars is Heaven!” illustrated by Wally Wood was expected to bring in between $30,000 and $50,000, while “The Flying Machine” by Krigstein was estimated to go for anywhere from $7,000 to $9,000. This imbalance seemed odd to me, not only because Krigstein was once held in such high regard, but also because Bradbury considered “The Flying Machine” to be “the single finest piece of art-drawing I’ve seen in years.” Not that I have anything against Wally Wood, you understand, it’s just that until I saw those predictions, I’d assumed the two artists were held in equal regard.

Now that the auctions are over, though, I’m feeling a little better about it all.

So how’d those auctions turn out?

“Mars is Heaven!” sold for $54,687.50, and “The Flying Machine” went for $27,500. Which means that while Heritage, at least based on its initial estimates, predicted that the world would value Wood over Krigstein by a ratio of approximately 5-1, the actual ratio turned out to be 2-1.

Because of that, and taking into account that Bradbury’s “Mars is Heaven!” is a far more beloved story (even though I always preferred “The Flying Machine”), I’m much less miffed on behalf of Krigstein.

(And if all this now piques your interest in his unique style, and you’d like to see more, check out this post-EC tale “The Desert Rat,” which manages to cram 73 panels into a single 4 page Stan Lee-scripted story!)

I made an interesting discovery about a somewhat forgotten piece of Marvel Comics history while reviewing those ’70s letters columns for my post on whether we Assistant Editors were stacking the deck against Jack Kirby. (Well, perhaps not forgotten by you, but when I came across one of the answers I gave, I thought for a moment I’d only been joking.)

A fan had complained that the constant use of exclamation points in comics “can get very boring,” and he wondered why we did it. My answer referenced that there’d been “an experimental run of Marvel Comics published in 1971, during which time all letterers used periods instead of exclamation points,” but that experiment hadn’t gone well.

Check out my full answer below.

My initial thought upon rereading this after so many years was … really? (more…)